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The last time I checked, Charlotte Bronte’s proto-modernist 1853 novel Villette was not set on an archaeological dig somewhere in the future. Yet for a writer as radical as Bronte, there is something aptly daring in Linda Marshall-Griffiths’ new stage version, which drops the bonnets and other trappings of heritage theatre and recasts Bronte’s diffident narrator Lucy Snowe as a cloned survivor of a deadly virus tasked with discovering the remains of a nun called the Lady of Villette.

Granted, it sounds a bit like something you might stumble across in a forsaken corner of the Edinburgh Fringe. But give it time, and Mark Rosenblatt’s production, part of the 200th anniversary Bronte season at WYP, makes a sort of sense.

Laura Elsworthy (right) as LucyCredit:
Anthony Robling

Bronte’s loosely autobiographical novel was written amidst the wilds of grief following the deaths from TB of her beloved sisters Emily and Anne, and her unrequited passion for M Heger, a married man she met in Brussels. In turn, Lucy Snowe, an English teacher abroad in Belgium, is one of English Lit’s most confounding narrators, an essentially unknowable woman whose fiercely passionate inner life is violently at odds with her rigorously disciplined public one and whose febrile state of mind as it moves between dream-like states of extremis is the novel’s main subject.

Here, as Laura Elsworthy’s insomniac, malnourished Lucy embarks on her project against Jess Curtis’s eerie set, where hi tech computers sit amid the dust and bones of an archeological dig, echoes from Bronte’s novel – and life – keep pushing through. It’s not just Lucy’s unresolved love affairs with Nana Amoo-Gottfried’s genial John and Philip Cairns’s endearingly hapless Paul; Catherine Cusack’s sinister, controlling Beck, who observes everything that happens on the dig via video surveillance, or the discovery of the nun’s crushed remains in the grounds. Rather, the dig becomes its own metaphor for Bronte’s themes of sexual and emotional repression, of loss (the unspecified trauma Lucy suffers is here spelt out as the deaths of her sisters) and of Lucy’s own, tumultuous inner journey from the depths of darkness towards the light.

Still, Elsworthy has her work cut out making Lucy work as a character. There is a certain skewed logic in making the emotionally locked down Lucy a clone. Yet while Elsworthy underlines Lucy’s self dissociation with jolting, mechanised speech patterns, at times it sounds as though she has swallowed a metronome. You sense, too, that Marshall-Griffiths has bitten off more than she can chew, her play ultimately defeated by Bronte’s extraordinary imagination. Yet Villette is an astonishing novel buried in the shadow of the much better known Jane Eyre. This play makes a fittingly bold stab at excavation.